Author Sue Monk Kidd takes us on a journey of the heart in her book "When the Heart Waits." She illustrates delightfully the importance of waiting, emphasizing that stillness is the most sacred position in life. Her journey through what can be described as a midlife crisis is sprinkled with beautiful moments of enlightenment. She embraces the moments of struggle and bliss understanding that there is no final destination. Life is a constant transition. I love Kidd's eloquent illustrations and appropriate use of metaphors. I feel as if I am in her memory experiencing the journey with her. This book is riddled with quotes from great authors and revolutionaries like Thoreau, Eliot, Jung and Merton. It is as if you are reading 50 books in one. Divided into short sub-chapters, each story holds a common theme, "acceptance." It is not until the experience is totally accepted that the lesson can be learned and the traveler can progress onward.
Kid explains the process of waiting in three distinct phases. They are separation, transformation and emergence. She illustrates these in detail describing the life of a butterfly from the caterpillar that separates itself from the rest by cocooning, to the transformation that takes place in the cocoon and finally the emergence of the butterfly as a new creature. Each phase has its purpose and is necessary for a total change or transformation to be experienced.
Here are a few quotes I found inspirational:
- "When the heart weeps for what it has lost, the spirit laughs for what it has found."
- "The assumption of spirituality is that always God is doing something before I know it. So the task is not to get God to do something I think needs to be done, but to become aware of what God is doing so that I can respond to it and participate and take delight in it." - Eugene Petersen
- "Our wounds become the womb." - Julian of Norwich (Transformation hinges on our ability to turn our pain (the tomb) into a fertile place where life is birthed (the womb).
- "Live our questions instead of suppressing them."
- "The person who suffers needs to stay with it, must not be a waster of sorrows." "the more still, more patient and more open we are when we are sad, so much the deeper and so much the more unswervingly does the new go into us, so much the better do we make it ours, so much the more will it be our destiny." Rilke
- "When busy people suddenly become still-when they begin to not only be human do-ings but human be-ings, people around them can get aggravated."
- "Now is the only place you really have, it is the only place where you and life intersect."
